Have you heard the Tech Enterprise IT Joke About Pets vs Cattle?
I have the answer for you from cofounder of Igneous Systems former star at Isilon in Seattle. He worked with all the top pioneers in web/hyper scale Facebook, Google, you name it, all the devops early builders. He had front row seat to the beginning we now call cloud scale.
Here is what pets vs cattle mean in technology world:
Add Containers:
If Pets < Cattle
then
Chickens > Cattle
If cattle beats pets then adding innovation of containers adds another animal to the meme — chickens
This is from an hpdev blog post I found on the web.
This got me to thinking. If you accept the zoomorphic pets vs. cattle meme for servers compared to cloud resources, what about containers? The animal that immediately sprang to my mind is the chicken, which I think is a useful entry in this comparative exercise.
Chickens grow to maturity much faster than cattle — six weeks for a chicken compared to around 24 months for cattle. They’re more efficient than cattle in terms of resource use — a chicken only takes 1.7 pounds of food to add a pound of mass, while a steer requires over three pounds.
This greater efficiency of chickens compared to cattle is exactly mirrored by containers vis a vis virtual machines. Container launch in seconds rather than the minutes more typical of virtual machines. Containers require far fewer compute resources in comparison to virtual machines.
So the meme is correct as far as it goes. It extends the pets vs. cattle original meme. However, and this is where the updated meme gets really interesting is how neatly it reflects what I expect the future reality of containers to demonstrate.
While the faster maturity and greater resource efficiency of chickens is interesting, where they get really fascinating is in their overall numbers. While the US supports around 87 million cattle each year, it has nearly 100 times as many chickens — 8 billion.
Likewise, I expect that in the future there will be perhaps 100 times as many containers in use as there are virtual machines today. A huge driver of resource consumption is convenience — and the more convenience associated with a given good or service, the more that we consume (as the English economist William Stanley Jevons explained 150 years ago, resources that are more efficient, i.e., lower in price than previous resources, result in more consumption rather than less; this is called Jevon’s Paradox).
